The lawyer and social-justice activist Bryan Stevenson first based the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in 1989, when he was 29 years previous. His purpose was to offer authorized illustration to death-row inmates and others unfairly handled by the criminal-justice system. However within the a long time that adopted, EJI has pursued efforts exterior the courts, within the type of memorials and museums, to finish narratives of racial inequity and to memorialise historic harms.
EJI’s first Legacy Websites, the Legacy Museum and the Nationwide Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in 2018 in Alabama’s state capital of Montgomery. By way of first-person historic narratives, paperwork, artefacts and artwork, the websites function memorials to victims of racial violence and chronicle the unresolved trauma of slavery, segregation and lynching. The Legacy Websites challenge expanded in 2024 with the 17-acre Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which honours the ten million Black individuals who have been enslaved within the US with site-specific works created by up to date artists.
Over time, tons of of 1000’s have visited Montgomery’s Legacy Websites, and the challenge’s attain continues to increase. A brand new lodge and conference centre spearheaded by Stevenson opened final 12 months to enhance the websites. In the meantime on the sculpture park, a site-specific work by the conceptual artist Charles Gaines was unveiled. And this month the latest Legacy Web site, Montgomery Sq., is scheduled to open—an exhibition corridor and backyard exploring Civil Rights activism within the Nineteen Fifties and 60s.
“I feel that is an extremely vital second, and I’m feeling actually grateful to be surrounded by folks and dealing with artists and others who’re serving to us attempt to meet this second with a deeper dedication to reality telling, not a retreat from reality telling,” Stevenson tells The Artwork Newspaper. He provides that the US can not transfer in direction of a simply future with out addressing its painful previous.
Stevenson’s great-grandparents have been enslaved, and he attended segregated colleges as a baby earlier than the supreme courtroom ordered them built-in in 1954. Stevenson witnessed first-hand how the rule of regulation may intervene the place political course of couldn’t. Later in life, his work as a trial lawyer enabled him to see connections between enslaved folks in cells and people incarcerated behind bars, and the way narratives exterior the courtroom bolstered these connections.
“We’re in a story wrestle,” he says. “There’s a story rooted in concern and anger that’s raging, and when folks permit themselves to be ruled by concern and anger, they begin tolerating issues you need to by no means tolerate, accepting issues you need to by no means settle for. It’s what results in a few of the worst moments in human historical past.”
To counter these sorts of dangerous narratives, Stevenson began with small however impactful markers of the historical past of enslavement and commenced creating the Legacy Websites, highly effective “truth-telling areas” within the type of museums, monuments and parks that each lay naked the US’s historical past of slavery, lynching and racial violence and honour its victims.
Archival picture of one of many marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, March 1965 Courtesy of the Equal Justice Initiative
Southern timber bear an odd fruit
In 2025, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park debuted Gaines’s new work Hanging Tree. The park, sited alongside the Alabama River and hemmed in by railroads constructed utilizing compelled labour, honours the lives of the enslaved—away from the sweeping however misleading grandeur of a plantation. It contains an genuine slave dwelling; sculptures by Alison Saar, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Simone Leigh, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, Kehinde Wiley and Hank Willis Thomas; and the 155ft-long Nationwide Monument to Freedom.
Gaines’s steel-and-bronze work depicts an uprooted tree secured by a noose swinging from a put up. The octogenarian artist took cues from Billie Vacation’s sombre 1939 tune Unusual Fruit, and he conceived of the tree as a metaphor for the legacy of lynchings.
“Unusual Fruit, the tune, refers to a physique swinging, an odd fruit swinging. And the concept of fruit and our bodies gave me the concept to make use of movement to the article,” Gaines advised EJI in October. “And I feel that that deepens the emotional actuality of lynching—not actually, however very poetically. And it’s that emotion that’s vital with a view to maintain this concept of the immense immorality, the terrible nature of discovering a method of legitimately hanging folks.”
Gaines mentioned his time on the Legacy Websites was certainly one of triumph; it supplied solutions to questions which have haunted him his entire life. Born in 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, he’s sufficiently old to have skilled Jim Crow legal guidelines and a segregated South.
The latest Legacy Web site picks up on this a part of the storyline—the pivotal years main as much as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Montgomery Sq. explores the large-scale activism and authorized reforms of the last decade that dismantled codified racial segregation. It uplifts the voices and actions of each well-known and lesser-known figures within the battle for Civil Rights—together with the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, which adopted the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to offer her seat to a white individual, and the 54-mile protest marches in 1965 to Montgomery from Selma, Alabama.
Martin Luther King Jr and John Lewis have been among the many leaders of those occasions, as have been activists like Claudette Colvin, Sheyann Webb, and Lynda Blackmon Lowery. By way of photos, archival analysis, artwork and interactive audiovisual elements, Montgomery Sq. guests study particular person acts of braveness and the collective energy of resistance within the face of systemic, racist and violent opposition.
Mugshots of members within the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott on show on the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama Courtesy of the Equal Justice Initiative
Creating a unique America
Stevenson is cautious to notice that Montgomery Sq. will not be a museum of accomplishment and closure. “I’m enthusiastic about reinterpreting this facet of the Civil Rights Motion and focusing extra on braveness and dedication and the work that is still, relatively than pure achievement and success,” he says. “It’s a continuing wrestle, and I feel that’s the concept we need to animate on this house.”
Stevenson cites the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voter discrimination primarily based on race, as one of the crucial vital items of laws—each when it was first enacted and at this time. “It has radically modified the financial, social, political and cultural panorama of this nation, as a result of when tens of millions of Black folks lastly have been in a position to vote, all the things shifted. Every thing modified,” he says. “And now we’re seeing a retreat from that, which is a part of the rationale why understanding this historical past and its significance is as well timed, vital and pressing at this time because it was 60 years in the past when these folks marched.”
The defining visible of Montgomery Sq. is a collection of mugshots that deliberately invert photos often tainted with negativity. The 115 organisers and activists who took half within the Montgomery bus boycott confronted their arrests (for an act of nonviolent resistance) with delight. Their official police pictures, a part of the archival show on the new Legacy Web site, additionally served as inspiration for a brand new site-specific work by Hank Willis Thomas. Different commissioned artwork there contains items by Basil Watson and Ronald McDowell. Poignantly, Stevenson saved a tree on the positioning slated for removing—an previous oak that was witness to the town’s historic occasions.
“What folks have been doing in Montgomery between 1955 and 1965—they weren’t simply attempting to get the precise to sit down on a bus,” Stevenson says. “They have been attempting to create a unique America.”
